Bespoke commission
“I wanted to get away from the computer and back to proper design and making.”
Claire takes commissions, from a single box to a whole cabinet. She calls it a collaborative process, and it runs from a paper sketch through a SketchUp drawing you can look at before anything is cut. Tell her the space and the use, and she will design something to fit it and make it to last.
Claire Broad creates handmade furniture, homewares and artwork, crafting timber into unique pieces that will enhance your home. She uses a selection of timbers carefully chosen & combined to best suit each item. Products are created using traditional cabinet making techniques blended with contemporary design
Out from behind a desk
Claire has always been creative but came to cabinet making via a circular route of theatre design at Central Saint Martin’s and 20 years in product development, most of which was working within the toy team at The Walt Disney Company. As time went on more & more time was spent on admin and less on the creative she enjoyed so in 2024 she retrained at the Waters & Acland Fine Furniture School in Cumbria and in 2025 she set up her own workshop on a farm in Staffordshire
The details matter
Her work often incorporates marquetry or hand-carved textures – she particularly enjoys the precision & patience these processes demand and the way that they can transform a functional piece into something distinctive and visually compelling. Marquetry was a key feature in her final piece at Waters & Acland and she stayed with it. It is the unforgiving part. A carcass joint or surface can be planed back, but a veneer ends up on the face of the finished piece, and a hairline gap stays a hairline gap. What it gives her in return are the decisions: which grain, which direction, which colour laid against which. She works geometrically rather than pictorially keeping the pieces contemporary rather than reproduction.
From a sketch to a final piece
Everything starts on paper, sketching out ideas, details, forms and moves onto the computer once the idea holds its shape. She tends to make to a plan rather than to a whim and aims to have work at a variety of price points - boxes and wall art at the accessible end, side tables and smaller furniture items above them, all the way to full bespoke furniture pieces. The next large project is an oak & sycamore cocktail cabinet.
She carefully sources timber from responsible suppliers and picks the joinery and the finish piece by piece. She uses reclaimed timber where it is good enough to use – a couple of boxes were made from an a sapele fire surround she removed from her home.
Claire trained as a theatre designer at Central Saint Martin's, then spent twenty years in product design and development, much of it at The Walt Disney Company. She retrained at the Waters and Acland Fine Furniture school in Cumbria and opened her own workshop in 2025, on a farm in Staffordshire.
Oak & ash are a favourite combination but she also uses other timbers such as sycamore & cherry for her furniture. The veneer work has an even wider variety of species and are selected for their tone and grain pattern. Some of the wall art uses Irish linen thread stitched onto the final piece to add texture.
Her furniture is solidly built often using techniques that have been used for generations. Drawers are dovetailed and can be traditionally fitted piston-tight or with modern soft-close runners.
She uses natural oils and waxes for the finish on all items so that a beautiful patina will build over time and they can always be repaired & renewed should they need to be.
